Sad and Lame

So yesterday morning I was up at some ungodly hour because I couldn't sleep. Okay, maybe 9 isn't ungodly, but whatever. I'm not even sure which morning news show it was, but a story came up entitled, "Cheerleader Dies After Breast Surgery". So many things irritate me about this, I don't even know where to begin.

1. Of course we only care about her because she is a cheerleader. Cheerleader = cute, fun, thin, etc etc etc. We wouldn't be interested in some fat old housewife dying during breast surgery because what is she doing getting any surgery done? She's fat and old, she doesn't need a boob job.

2. Breast surgery is very vague. Were they being reduced, enlarged, what? Does it really matter? Given our sex-saturated culture, they want us to assume that she was getting implants. And since she's a cheerleader she's probably making 'em bigger anyway, so she can fill out her uniform better and add that extra pep to the routine.

Come to find out, what she died of had nothing to do with the surgery itself or complications from that, but from the anesthesia. The young woman, Stephanie Kuleba, died of malignant hyperthermia. But of course a headline having to do with that wouldn't be interesting. Anything about cheerleaders and breasts grabs attention right away, but otherwise people wouldn't care. What is also kind of irritating about how this was presented is that this can happen during any kind of surgery or procedure, since the anesthesia is the cause. One of the doctors they interviewed on the show talked about how he'd only seen it once while he was in surgery and it was on a male who was having nasal surgery or something.

I think my point is being lost. It's a sad story about a girl who was having what seems to be a legit surgery to correct something she wasn't happy with and died from an extremely rare condition that no one knew she had and most don't know it occurs. But the way it was presented was kind of ridiculous and that in itself is also sad. There's more info in the article here.